> I would not agree that's a problem, and I would disagree that > such a change should be made. vi warns, emacs warns. > 1) Sometimes I edit a read only file, as a convenient way to > do other sorts of operations on it. Opening to read a > read-only file is not an error warning, not error. > 2) If and when I do try to write out changes to a read-only > file, it's easy to deal with the write error by writing my > changes out to a tmp file, quitting ed, and applying the > changes some other way. it usually is a big shock to me, and sometimes one discovers there is no place permanent to write at all -- all that typing will disappear... > 3) ed is legacy software - most users and usages have been > around a long time. One should not tweak discretionary > details of ed; fix real bugs, but leave the details that > are cosmetic or a matter of opinion or fashion -alone-. > Each non-essential change to ed breaks something or some > usage. OK, maybe $ ed /etc/motd 355 readonly<--adding this might break scripts, I don't know. $ ed /etc/motdd /etc/motdd: No such file or directory<--but one could also remove warnings like this, and the warning from vi. OK, you are the pros, what do I know. Anyway, ed should still be around for the next 10000 years, so might as well fix the places that might cause one to lose work.
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